BulletProofBlog the blog on crisis communications

You've conquered the blogosphere. You've "friended" colleagues to build your Facebook social network and you are LinkedIn up to your eyeballs.

You have embraced the power of the Internet and effectively demonstrated your social media savvy. And now, just as you are about to pat yourself on the back for being ahead of the curve, the next new media craze becomes the talk of the office.

At first, you convince yourself that you misunderstood the water cooler conversation. Your colleagues must have been amateur Ornithologists discussing the mating calls of the African red-tailed buzzard right? After all, what else could a group of professionals discussing "tweets", "tweeting" and "twitterers" possibly have meant?

You then turn to Google - and immediately realize that Twitter is a bird of an entirely different feather. It' s the fastest growing social networking Website on the planet. You now know that Wired' s Paul Boutin wasn' t kidding when he wrote, "Twitter … is to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004."

Don' t worry, we' ve got you covered. In the next 180 seconds you will learn everything you need to know about the latest social media craze:

Twitter - a microblogging site that offers users a quick, easy, personal, and condensed way to send 140-character real-time updates to their social network - has become a marquee online resource for your customers, employees and the general public to distribute information, products reviews, rants, and personal news in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Comcast, Dell, and Kodak are already tuning into the tweets for a better understanding of consumer views. As these pioneers have discovered, Twitter enables companies to monitor hot topics, identify consumer complaints before they spiral out of control, and communicate directly with their most loyal (or disaffected) consumers.

If you thought the blogosphere moved fast, Twitter might as well be travelling at light speed - but it is possible to keep up with the Twitter conversation with three resources that are becoming essential to online reputation management and consumer outreach.

First, to help filter out the millions of irrelevant tweets, TweetBeep- which is similar to Google Alerts - allows you to sign up for alerts every time your brand or product is mentioned in the Twitter realm.     

Next, for those looking to delve even deeper, Twist provides comparative analysis of trends on Twitter  - serving up useful information on which brands are in the spotlight, and what is being said about them.      

Finally, not all Twitter users are equal in their influence. Some have a handful of followers while others have thousands. Knowing the reach and following of these social media provocateurs is critical, Twinfluence allows users to identify which twitterers are high-authority and which are not.

All indications are that Twitter is here to stay - and if your company isn' t listening for the tweets, it' s probably missing out on a lot of the online conversation. You' ve added some powerful new tools to your digital communications arsenal over the last few years. Add one more and you may truly earn the title of social media master… at least for now.